by Leah Franqui
Both boys had left Bangladesh virgins, at least as far as Satya knew. And yet, it had never occurred to him before to question this knowledge. He was annoyed with himself. Why had he trusted Ravi with something so important?
Satya’s time in America had already exposed him to many women and had given him a new understanding of what it meant for women to be so on display. At home in Sylhet, women’s bodies were largely shaded from the male gaze, and their faces, with their downcast eyes, held no invitations. America, however, was completely different, in ways he never could have anticipated.
Each of the guides around Satya was looking at the girl like a dog watching hanging chickens in a butcher shop. It was a profound comfort to Satya to know that these men also watched women with a single-minded focus. Together they made a detailed study of the strange girl’s body (slim, but with nicely shaped breasts and sweetly curving hips), which was covered with a floating thin top that was somehow longer in the back than in the front, an issue with the manufacturing, Satya assumed. Her legs were clad in tight-fitting gray pants that ended at her ankles, and small shoes that looked like slippers fit her feet, with an anklet gently gracing her right ankle like a ribbon around a present. When he finally found the time to examine her face, Satya found it to be a pale heart-shaped one surrounded by light brown and honey-tinted wavy wisps of hair. Large brown eyes sat widely over a substantial but not overwhelming nose, and plump pink lips pursed, he realized, in an expression of concern. She did not, he suddenly understood, enjoy being stared at by a roomful of strange men. She hesitated once, shrinking into herself against so many concentrated gazes, but then walked on, and for a moment Satya admired her.
He turned back to his terrible lunch and his studying. Whatever was going on with this woman and Boss, it was certainly no concern of his. His grandmother, he knew, would have been happy with him for averting his eyes. Ravi would have mocked him, calling him an idiot. But Ravi wasn’t there. Satya was not sure if what he felt was guilt or relief. His eyes looked at a passage from his tour book on the Grand Canyon, describing the Hopi people and their devotion to the canyon as a religious site. He tried to lose himself in the book, but the image of the canyon swirled in front of his eyes, becoming at once Ravi’s smile and this strange woman’s face, shrinking and pinched with discomfort. If she had had a dupatta on, he thought, I never would have known.
11
Rebecca sat, ramrod straight, in front of the strange man who Mr. Ghazi had assured her was far less dodgy than he seemed.
The plump, small figure in front of her had on the most gold jewelry that she had ever seen on any man. He wore three gold chains around his neck, the longest of which dipped into the hairy V formed by the undone top buttons of his collared shirt. The shirt itself was a violent shade of puce, a color Rebecca had never actually seen in real life and was surprised to find looked exactly the way it sounded, like something toxic.
He had several bracelets around his pudgy wrists, which were exposed by his shirtsleeves. His stomach wasn’t grossly large, but it extended gently over the top of his black pants. He wore gold rings with gemstones on each of his fingers, except for his thumbs, whose rings instead held large golden structures that looked to Rebecca like Aztec temples. The effect was finished off by what smelled like a potpourri shop of men’s fragrances, from sandalwood to Axe body spray, undercut slightly by the smell of antacids. Opening his mouth, Mr. Munshi revealed a tongue coated in light pink, and he ate a handful of Tums like candy, crunching loudly.
Mr. Munshi was sweating profusely, his armpits showing deeper shades of puce whenever he lifted his hands. A cold cup of tea sat next to his elbow and Rebecca worried vaguely that his enthusiastic hand gestures might send it tipping all over his desk at any moment.
Mr. Ghazi had explained that Mr. Munshi’s business catered mostly to Indian tourists. At first she had thought he was merely sharing a tidbit of information with her, but the urgency in his gaze and the blatant hope on the face of the other man, who introduced himself with a sweaty handshake and the words “Ronnie Munshi, madam, very pleased, impressed, and happy to meet you,” had convinced Rebecca that something else was going on.
Mr. Ghazi took the long way around when explaining things, a quality that Rebecca had initially found frustrating but now enjoyed, understanding that this was simply his way of being polite, sidling up to an important or difficult subject without tackling it right away. Mr. Ghazi began this particular explanation by contextualizing Mr. Munshi, describing briefly Bangladesh and his own experience with the country, which was nonexistent, and mentioning Mr. Munshi’s wife, Anita, and the circumstances of their relationship. He then moved on to Mr. Munshi’s work, its evolution out of his time on the Circle Line, and Mr. Ghazi’s own feelings on boats and their attractions, and then settled upon this new client of Mr. Munshi’s, who, Rebecca realized by Mr. Munshi’s sudden interest in the conversation, had been the point all along.
When Mr. Ghazi had mentioned Rebecca as a potential companion for the trip she had immediately started shaking her head no. She could miss auditions. It would be insane to leave town, no matter what they were willing to pay her, no matter how much she could use the money. She simply couldn’t leave New York for something that wasn’t an acting job.
However, Mr. Ghazi had looked her in the eye and asked her to think about it, and so she had agreed to do so, while privately feeling that her decision had already been made.
When she got home, though, she couldn’t get Mr. Ghazi or Mr. Munshi out of her mind. She thought about his stumbling description of this widow languishing in Kolkata, and his heartfelt and circuitous explanations of how this trip would make the widow’s life worth living.
She thought of Time magazine photos she had seen of women in white saris weeping while tossing the ashes of their husbands into the Ganges. One image had stayed with her, a woman, mouth open, tossing the ashes into the water. She wondered if she should, in fact, take the job. After all, it wasn’t like anyone would cast her for anything anyway. She scolded herself for her self-pity, but the damage was already done, and she thought more seriously about this trip, now considering it less a death sentence for her career and more an escape from her dull and unrewarding life.
Rebecca decided to call her mother, who she knew might give her good advice by virtue of recommending the thing Rebecca least wanted to do. Arguments with her mother solidified Rebecca’s resolve on a number of issues and she looked forward to them as a kind of reinforcement against her own fears.
The phone rang twice.
“Yes?” Cynthia barked, her usual greeting. This alternately amused and annoyed Rebecca, depending on her mood. Today, she found it soothing.
“Hey, Mom.” Rebecca heard an audible sigh from her mother.
“Well, it’s good to know you are alive, Rebecca,” her mother said briskly, her words clipped, “although I wish I received proof more often.”
“Sorry, Mom. I’ve been busy.”
“You got a thing? Some show or something?”
Rebecca gritted her teeth.
“Not quite.”
“Ah. So what do you have to be busy about?”
Rebecca counted to five slowly, a trick some daytime talk show had implied was good for uncontrollable rage. It never worked.
“Rebecca? Are you still there? It’s gone quiet. Stupid phone. I keep telling Morris—”
“Yeah, I’m here, Mom. Listen, I have something I want to talk to you about. You remember my boss?”
“You have a job?” Rebecca gritted her teeth again at this and waited. “Oh, the map store. Yes. Right. He’s Saudi, right?”
“Persian. Anyway, look, through him, it doesn’t matter how, basically someone needs a companion for a cross-country trip, and he asked me if I would want to do it. And I’m just wondering what you think.”
“A companion? Is that like, what is that?”
Rebecca smiled at her mother’s worried tone, realizing what she feared this job
might entail. “It’s not an escort thing. It’s not, like, sexual. The person who needs the companion is a woman—”
“That doesn’t preclude sexuality, Rebecca.”
“Mom, she’s an Indian widow from Kolkata so even if she swings that way I think it’s going to be pretty latent. She wants to go on a tour, and she has a guide, but he’s a man, so she wants a woman to come along for, I guess, modesty? Safety? I don’t know. It’s all expenses paid and it’s three thousand dollars in my pocket. Two weeks, cross-country, New York to L.A.”
Rebecca waited for her mother’s opinion, sure that it would come pouring out of Cynthia like a geyser.
“Why isn’t she going to San Francisco?”
“What?”
“Indians love San Francisco. She should go. Your dad had these Indian clients—they lived here, obviously, but both from India—and that was their favorite place to go.”
“But they got a divorce, obviously, right?”
“Yes. But they still loved it. She should go.”
Rebecca held the phone away from her face for a moment and hissed. She would have screamed but her apartment was too small and the phone too good at picking up her voice. She had few ways to express her frustration with her mother, and she had found that hissing was satisfying, in the absence of a good scream.
“What was that? Did you get a cat?”
“No, Mom, maybe something outside. Listen. What do you think I should do?”
“Don’t get a cat, that apartment is too small, you will never stop smelling litter.”
“About. The. Trip.” Rebecca wished her mother didn’t drive her to such rage but she always did. It was why Rebecca didn’t call.
“Ah. There’s no need to shout. We were talking about cats.” Rebecca had started thinking about how to end the phone call when her mother surprised her by asking:
“What do you want to do? Really want, not just what you think you should do. Because, Becky, you’ve never been across the country. She sounds a little bit amazing, this widow, traveling like this alone after her husband’s death, wanting to see the world. It might be worth it to go, get out of New York, clear your head, think about things, but only if it’s what you want to do. So what do you want?”
This thoughtful response from her mother startled Rebecca, and tears sprang to her eyes. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother had acknowledged that what she wanted mattered. She knew her mother loved her, and wanted what she considered to be best for her, she did, it was only that what her mother considered best and what she considered best often lived in two separate worlds, and Rebecca could never seem to connect the two.
“I did something like this once,” said her mother, interrupting Rebecca’s thoughts. “There wasn’t the whole widow thing, but I took a trip across the country alone to visit your father when he was at Stanford for law school. I had the summer off at Princeton, I had a car and some money saved from whatever job I was working to pay my rent, and I thought, Screw it. I got lost so many times and ended up in so many places that by the time I got to Palo Alto I had to turn right back around and go home. But it was great. I hated every minute of it, and it was great.”
Rebecca smiled, imagining her organized and compulsive mother as a young hippie on the road alone.
“If you want to do this, do it. It’s a few weeks of your life. Why not?” Rebecca couldn’t think of a single reason.
And so, the next day in Ronnie Munshi’s office, his sweat dripping off the end of his nose, his staff craning their necks to see her, she agreed to accompany Mrs. Sengupta across the country. The happiness in his eyes briefly obliterated her doubts. She knew that the doubts would return, furiously pinching at her mind through the night, but for now, she would bask in the sense of relief this would give her bank account and the knowledge that Mr. Ghazi would be pleased.
Rebecca watched Mr. Munshi leave Mrs. Sengupta a message in a strange mix of English and what she assumed had to be Bengali, informing her that everything was all prepared and the trip would begin with its three New York City days as soon as she arrived. That gave Rebecca three days to prepare and one perfect excuse to politely end things with Max. Part of her was terrified, her doubts already rising like mosquitoes out of a swamp, but the time for dithering was over. She had wanted something in her life to change, and now, albeit briefly, it would. Besides, at least it was another role to play.
12
After escorting Rebecca out of the building, Ronnie had decided to take a trip to the Ganesh Temple in Flushing to make an offering thanking the gods for her agreement and the end of his worries over this whole mess. In order to reach the temple, Ronnie had to take the 7 train out to its final stop and then walk for thirty minutes, which was thirty minutes more than Ronnie was accustomed to walking on any given day. The idea of this much exercise made his heart hurt in anticipation, but he was determined to do it, because the gods had answered his prayers.
Smelling soy sauce and rotting garbage in the air, he girded himself for the journey as the train pulled into the final stop on Flushing’s Main Street. As he walked up the stairs of the subway his knees creaked in protest, but he refused to listen to them, keeping his divine mission on his mind. Emerging into the sun, however, Ronnie was distracted by the lusciously spicy smells coming from a noodle house on Roosevelt Avenue. His stomach growling, he realized that in the anticipation of his interview with Rebecca he had forgotten to eat. This was an indication of the toll this issue had taken on Ronnie’s life, as the concept of forgetting to eat was an utterly foreign one to him.
The smells around him made his mouth drip with saliva. He looked at the many food shops and restaurants. All the writing was in Chinese and he could not tell what would be the best lunch possible. He decided to go where the people seemed the happiest, and soon sat down in front of a small cup of weakly brewed tea at the Happy Frog Noodle Café. Ronnie settled in for a large lunch as compensation for his stress. To order, he simply started pointing at other people’s meals, which the waiter correctly interpreted as desire, and he was delivered plate after plate of pork. He ate them with mingled glee and wonder, for the meat still felt like a novelty to Ronnie after his childhood in a country of halal butchers.
When all the meat was gone, Ronnie washed down his last bite of sweet bean buns with the weak tea that had grown no stronger from its steeping. It was already three thirty in the afternoon. It would take him at least half an hour to reach the temple and he really ought to be getting back to work. The guides became utterly useless without his careful eye observing them. He decided to forgo the gods and contented his need to leave an offering by leaving a large tip for his waiter instead. He was sure the man would be thrilled by the two extra dollars he’d included to accompany his fifteen-dollar meal. And money was a kind of sacrifice, wasn’t it? Besides, the girl, Rebecca, was white, so he probably shouldn’t be thanking Hindu gods for her anyway.
Satisfied with his logic, he ground his fortune cookie into dust, and feeling settled, Ronnie returned to his office, softly humming a Sanskrit hymn. He called Satya into his office and explained to the boy that not only had he given the untried youth the magnificent opportunity of a cross-country tour, but, benevolent boss that he was, he was also gracing his life with a companion—in fact, the young woman who had visited the office earlier. She would be invaluable in helping manage the elderly madam. Satya would be in charge, of course, and should report to Ronnie daily, but— And here Ronnie broke off because Satya looked as though he had seen a ghost. His eyes were glazed over and he didn’t seem to be listening to a word out of Ronnie’s mouth.
“Now is no time to be doing daydreaming!” Ronnie yelled, incensed.
Satya shook his head several times to clear it, his hands stretched out in front of him in a gesture of begging pardon. Ronnie was slightly mollified at what he took to be an apology. He repeated himself in Bengali to Satya, just to be sure he understood everything clearly. Then, switching back to English, he contin
ued:
“Companion is very nice girl. American. Be respectfully of modesty. No hanky or panky. No ideas. Right hand is there for a reason. Understand?”
Satya closed his mouth and blushed bright beet red.
“Is this clear or no?”
Satya nodded briskly, pleasing Ronnie. He liked to think of himself as a beloved boss, tough but fair. He was happy when his employees responded as if this was the case.
“Excellent. Well done. Day after next madam comes. She has three days here, then you leave. Are you packed?”
Satya nodded, less certainly this time, his eyes shifting away from Ronnie’s gaze. Ronnie sighed, reaching for more Tums.
He had seen that look before. He remembered his own beginnings, with his pitifully few possessions, the denim coat that didn’t last the first winter. He was sure this boy had nothing, a comb, a few changes of clothing, a pot or pan perhaps where he made his terrible meals. Far too many of the Bangladeshis Ronnie had met in America lived the most barren existence possible—not, Ronnie had discovered, because they were as incompetent with housework as he had been, but because they didn’t know how to accumulate anything. When Ronnie could help, he did, as much as possible. He considered it a good investment, and the only act of charity he could justify doing. For the sake of his guides, Ronnie kept a store of shirts in different sizes in the office, along with belts and shoes, and whenever he observed one of his boys, as he thought of them, struggling, he made a point of helping. Pride was all well and good, but New York was painful for those without socks.
Standing, he took three hundred dollars out of his wallet.
“Here. Trip bonus. Buy more things. Better things. Something warm. Yes? It will be cold in some places. Hot in others. Best to be prepared.”